During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Nick Waterhouse, Senior Marketing Manager at Evaluator Group. This interview takes a deep dive into his past work experience as an entrepreneur - when he built and sold a company that made headphones. After exiting his headphone company, Nick took on a role as Senior Marketing Manager at Evaluator Group. Evaluator Group is an IT analyst consulting firm based in Boulder, Colorado.

Highlights

• Nick starts the interview by providing some insight into his entrepreneurial efforts when he started and then ultimately sold a headphone company that specialized in ergonomic, memory foam earbuds. 
• When starting the headphone company in China, Nick was introduced into a wide range of digital marketing disciplines and realized how much he enjoys spending his time there.
• After a period of success, Nick describes how he sold his headphone company and decided to dive into the marketing field head-on by working for an IT analyst firm.
• Nick explains the fundamental similarities and differences between B2B and B2C companies.
• Nick describes how a consumer can easily see a set of headphones and understand its cost structure, whereas the same is not the case with working for a consulting firm.
• Nick takes some time to provide a description of Evaluator Group’s ideal customer profile, which really includes two major types of customers - vendors and end-users.
• For vendors, the company mostly relies upon relationships with major players such as IBM, VMWare, etc. 
• From an end-user perspective, Evaluator Group’s ideal customer is anybody who’s looking for a new solution in the data storage industry, or a person who's having a problem with the way they're currently managing their data.
• Nick discusses the challenges with marketing the company’s services because, in this day and age, there are so many types of roles who manage a company’s data - IT Specialists, Cloud Specialist and a range of other titles.

• Webinars are one of the successful approaches to attract potential customers - and the company really tries to keep them unscripted and “personal.”
• Product reviews of data storage products attracts prospects and also serves as a great tool for marketing.
• The company is completely unbiased and does not have any pay-to-play relationships with vendors. All information available on their website is researched by analysts.
• Nick’

This episode is produced by New North. New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Kristen Moore, Chief Marketing Officer at InVia Robotics. The interview focuses on 

past work experience and how she’s applied a lot of lessons learned to her current role with a “robotics-as-a-service” startup. She also takes a deeper dive into her marketing strategy and how she’s focused on collaborating with the sales team.

Highlights

• Kristen started her professional career in telecom, working for companies like Lucent Technologies and AT&T, before transitioning to other tech companies.
• Later on, she moved to digital media and other internet-related companies and software as service e-commerce companies.
• She mentions that throughout her career, she has always been interested in new technology and figuring out how to bring that to market.
• She discusses her roles as a contributor, in areas such as advertising, business development and even PR, which helped her figure out the right combination of marketing and how to make marketing more powerful overall.
• Searching for creativity in her role and new technologies brought her to InVia Robotics.
• InVia Robotics provides a mobile automation solution to e-commerce companies and helps them become more efficient.
• InVia also helps e-commerce companies to fulfill their orders.
• Kristen discusses the antiquated processes (at the warehouse) that are often in place for many e-commerce companies.
• Figuring out how to implement a technical and complicated solution and determining how to select the right solution is the main challenge InVia has dealt with along the way.
• Kristen mentioned that e-commerce has become very popular and the whole shopping process is frictionless, but a buyer doesn’t have knowledge that it creates a lot of pressure on the vendors. 
• The ideal customer for InVia is any customer that’s selling products online, but not on Amazon, and needs help to be more efficient so that buyers get the right product to the right people quickly.
• She talks about how a common theme in her career is tackling technologies that are new and that often don’t have a precedent in place within the market.
• The customer’s journey of an organization is quite different from other technologies - a lot of the journey involves helping people understand automation and the importance of the new world.

This episode is produced by New North. New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino chats with Rebecca White, Vice President of Marketing at Databook. During the podcast episode, Rebecca talks about her past working experience in B2B organizations. Her experience stems from mostly field sales organizations where she’s driven pipeline from a marketing perspective. Rebecca also discusses her current role at Databook which is a startup that differentiates itself as an Enterprise Customer Intelligence platform.

Highlights

• Rebecca graduated with a degree in English and feels this helps her understand how to analyze information and share information which resonates with people.
• Rebecca starts the podcast by sharing information about her past experience working with B2B organizations and building marketing functions. 
• She talks about how she got into marketing after taking jobs at an entry-level after school.
• She spent about ten years in marketing, consulting, running a marketing strategy company. 
• Rebecca introduces Databook as a platform that reduces the time that Account Execs spend on research and then provides them with a financial case for change so that they can close more deals faster, which drives pipeline acceleration across the board. 
• She discusses how it’s important for marketers to have industry expertise, because it’s easier to learn a product than it is to learn about an entire market.
• She discusses the marketing function of startups which change every three to six months.
• Rebecca states that it’s good to be a generalist because tools change, flows change - find out what works and what doesn’t work.
• When discussing the platform, Rebecca mentions that apart from the regulatory, compliance-related part, one needs to have the right data to send the right messages to people. 
• Tech stack and data is a storyboarding process because you need different inputs and outputs -  the entire process is like putting a puzzle together. 
• Setting up a foundation, making sure everything is correct, making sure that, everything is in compliance, building out the messages, building out all the materials are things that are required to accelerate the business.
• Creating an inbound engine is a lot more expensive than creating an outbound engine, but it bears much more fruit in the long term.
• One of Rebecca’s early initiatives was at least installing a “billboard” for th

This episode is produced by New North. New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Gaurav Harode, Founder of Enablix. During this interview, Gaurav talks about his past work experience in enterprise software and how he embarked upon his journey of creating Enablix - a company founded in 2017. Gaurav talks about the challenges sales professionals face with organizing and sharing the best content and pinpoints how technology can help them break through the noise. 

Highlights

• Gaurav starts the conversation by sharing some background information about his fifteen years of working experience in financial services, selling risk, and compliance products.
• He talks about his experience working at Oracle leading their go to market and product management strategy.
• Enablix was founded in 2017 with the vision of making the process easier for B2B and product marketers, to manage content and help their sales team.
• The ideal customer’s profile is a midsize or small organization that includes a salesforce of one hundred sales representatives or less.
• The main challenge of many of Enablix’s customers is utilizing content throughout the entire sales process - once a campaign is done, or sales meeting is complete.
• The primary driving force of Enablix is to allow marketers to scale their content and ensure that the content doesn't get lost within the typical cloud storage platforms.
• He talks about the sales process of Enablix and how, as a startup, he really focused on just getting feedback from prospective customers versus trying to close immediately.
• He shares some of his highs and lows which he has encountered during his startup’s journey.
• Enablix’s top priority is their prospect list and this ensures that all outreach is highly targeted and is within the ideal customer profile.
• The organization uses blog content to educate prospects and to fuel engagement within emails and other outreach.
• One of the biggest challenges many salespeople face is personalization because automation most often prevents highly personalized emails.
• Gaurav talks about the challenge he faces with being consistent with outreach because he values a lot of personalization in his process.

Key Points

• Enablix works with B2B  marketing teams and enables them to organize the content, as the content is the nerve center of the marketing and sales process.

This episode is produced by New North. New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Joan Silver, the VP of Marketing at Sixgill. Joan talks about her experience in digital marketing - which began with an internet pioneer, Mapquest. Joan talks about the addiction of going along for the ride in a venture like Mapquest and how some of what she learned applies today. With experiences of more than a decade in B2B marketing, Joan brings a lot to the table with her role at Sixgill.

Highlights

• Joan starts the conversation by providing some insight into her past working experience in digital marketing.
• She started her career with Mapquest which offered free maps and driving directions to anyone who had internet access.
• She worked with Mapquest for over a decade and learned about B2B marketing as the company transitioned from B2C to more enterprise customers. 
• At Mapquest, she worked with brands like Walmart who used their services for transportation, logistics, and supply chain applications.
• She explained how Mapquest launched her career in the combination of B2B, B2C branding.
• The goal of  MapQuest was to make maps ubiquitous, to make online digital mapping ubiquitous and accessible to everyone.
• Joan discusses the exciting challenges with Sixgill and how the company helps others manage the data associated with the internet of things.
• Sixgill also helps companies in solving the accurate and continuous collection of data, through maintaining its integrity with a blockchain solution for data security. In this way, Sixgill makes sure that data does not tamper.
• For the most part, Sixgill is a B2B tech company, but there are some applications applicable in a B2C context.
• Joan mentioned that a journey from MapQuest to Sixgill has been remarkably successful and a great learning opportunity.
• Joan discusses the types of customers the company targets and how it’s more of a horizontal market versus a select group of industry verticals.
• Sixgill has worked successfully within the construction space and healthcare, by helping companies eliminate the manual process of data automation.
• Sixgill is associated with quite a few cutting edge technologies and video AI is a very interesting use case for customers across several industries.

This episode is produced by New North. New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Justin Brown chats with Veronique Lafargue, Vice President of Marketing at STRIVR. This interview takes a deeper look into Veronique’s past working experience and highlights how she helped build one of the first marketing teams for Google Cloud. She also covers how she transitioned form content marketing to more of a marketing leadership role at STRIVR. 

Highlights

• Veronique starts the conversation by sharing some of her past working experiences at companies like Google.
• She then talks about some of the earlier efforts she made as a content marketer where she worked for over ten years.
• Veronique led some of the first content marketing campaigns for Google Cloud, focusing on Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa target audiences.
• In many ways, content marketing for enterprise cloud services was very new and she had a passion for storytelling to connect with B2B buyers.
• With her success on Google Cloud, Veronique transitioned to lead the content strategy for all of GSuite internationally.
• Veronique switched to her current company about one and a half years ago.
• She talks about STRIVR and how it’s a leader in immersive learning and virtual reality training solutions which was incubated at Stanford University.
• STRIVR started off early by signing about 14 teams in college football, professional football, and NBA, and even the U.S Ski Team.
• Veronique talks about how they moved from training for athletes to training for employees and associates, and especially the art of frontline workers.
• STRIVR has developed a unique methodology based on learning and development expertise and uses the unique benefits of VR to train people.
• STRIVR’s ideal customer is someone who can see how learning and development today can impact the business.
• She the core departments that STRIVR typically works with, mostly starting with the HR organization of a company and then moving to other departments who are interested in the benefits of immersive learning.
• She talks about how STRIVR rebranded themselves by building a strong foundation and built their website from scratch.
• According to Veronique, influencers are really important to spread the word and connect with the executive level buyer.

This episode is produced by New North. New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino chats with Adam Kranitz, Senior Director of Marketing, Brand & Communications at CloudCheckr. This interview takes a look at Adam’s past work experience which includes more than 20 plus years in creative services and technology marketing. Adam takes a deep dive into his role at CloudCheckr and shares his perspective on storytelling and other marketing campaign tactics.

Highlights

• Adam Krantiz starts the conversation by sharing some insight into his past work experience - starting with more technical roles before transitioning into marketing.
• He started his career as a video editor, graphic designer, and producer of corporate videos and has seen a transition from analog tape to digital to high definition content.
• He took his first job right after college working for a video production company in Washington, D.C.
• He joined CloudCheckr four years ago and is focused on cloud computing, AWS, and how businesses can transform how they function, using the power of the public cloud.
• He explains why he decided to initially take up a producer role, creative role, and then eventually marketing to sell and market services, but not be the guy behind the computer screen.
• This career change was quite transformational as he could actually focus on storytelling using any type of media instead of just depending on video or graphic designers.
• He talks about the marketing field in general and how it’s one of those disciplines that perhaps touches more fields of study than any other.
• He breaks down the struggles of marketers which involves the psychology of a buyer and the ability to understand how to use technology in the service of a story.
• CloudCheckr works in the industry of cloud computing and especially with those who are actively using a public cloud. 
• CloudCheckr is using a combination of Salesforce as CRM of record and Marketo for its marketing automation platform.
• Adam breaks down some of the challenges marketers have with data and discusses how CloudCheckr commits to cleansing their data and appending their marketing/contact data with the latest information.
• At CloudCheckr, Adam is primarily responsible for brand messaging, communications, external comms, copywriting, creative services, etc. 

This episode is produced by New North. New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Blair Felter, Marketing Director at vXchnge. The interview focuses on her past experiences with programmatic advertising before shifting over to an in-house role with a technology company. Blair also breaks down how she’s built marketing functions at a few technology companies, blending content, advertising and other marketing tactics to drive demand.

Highlights

• Blair starts the conversation by providing insight into her past working experience which includes oil, gas, pharma and the fintech industries.
• She talks about her working experience and how she helped a mobile app company and fintech financial services company to start their marketing departments.
• She also talks about her responsibilities at vXchnge, which starts with establishing the brand and getting the other core components of marketing in place.
• Blair highlights what vXchnge does and who the company serves. vXchnge is a data center and co-location operating service provider.
• The company mostly focuses on an organization that has to process online transactions and needs their services for auditing purposes - this is the company’s ideal customer for the most part.
• vXchnge is a data center that is engineered for perfection and has an incredible SLA uptime rate.
• She mentions the fundamental difference between vXchnge and its competitors which have built locations in a variety of growth markets.
• She discusses how the company has evolved its marketing since she joined and she’s witnessed the focus shift more towards doing shorter blogs and videos instead of long-form blog posts. 
• She believes that a customer needs to know what you’re doing for them...plain and simple and this comes through education.
• In 2018 to 2019, their traffic grew 525% only by doing SEO building and just being smarter with the content.
• She explains the importance of Google reviews and how it helped vXchnge in establishing customer relationships and allowed people to find them based on their location.
• vXchnge has a nurture program that is purely based on educating customers - the focus is more about the content and moving them into sales when they’re ready.
• For generating long term content, vXchnge relies mostly on organic engagement with a target rollout of one blog post per week.

This episode is produced by New North. New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with James Winter, VP of Marketing at Brandfolder. The interview focuses on James’ past experiences and current role working in the B2B software as a service (SaaS) industry. Brandfolder is a company that helps marketers and creatives track, manage and protect their brand elements across all platforms.

Highlights

• James talks about his past working experience and the different industries he has worked with, including roles in telecom and other software firms.
• James talks about the paradigm shift within brands functioning and how they have been inundated with the explosion of content, whether it’s video or photos or 3d files, or 360-degree viewer images.
• James discusses the different challenges faced by brands managing various digital assets.
• James mentions that he strives to get inside the customer's head and that’s what interests him the most about marketing. 
• Brandfolder is working on inbound marketing and G2 for reviews as it tends to influence their deals.
• James discusses the typical customer’s journey which ultimately leads to a traditional SaaS opportunity stage model, ultimately leading to a purchase of a subscription or even a multi-year deal.
• James explains the challenges within a customer’s journey and making them understand the difference between DAM and Cloud storage - as technology can easily solve their problems.
• James explains some of the aspects of Brandfolder’s content strategies and covers a focus on generating content through videos and advertising on social media platforms.
• Brandfolder is more inclined to focus on the demand-side and works on how to illustrate the brand value with the ads on paid social media platforms.
• Brandfolder’s main goal is tied around a qualified pipeline and this is determined based upon the deal value after a qualification call occurs with a sales representative.
• James mentions how there is reporting around leads and other marketing metrics, but the big focus on what marketing is accountable for is tied to a qualified lead pipeline.

Key Points

• James Winter said “And you know, if you're selling one or two products, it can be relatively easy to distribute that asset or, organize it in the sort of typical folder base structure. But, when you're talking about these lengthy supply chains and the stakeholders at a lot of different touchpoints, it gets a little bit

This episode is produced by New North. New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.

Episode Summary

During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with Sarah Peduzzi, the Director of Marketing at Jetpack Workflow. During the podcast episode, Sarah talks about her past experiences with agencies and how she applies a lot of that knowledge to her current role at a tech company. Sarah also covers how she likes getting a little deeper with one company versus working with several different companies while at an agency.

Episode Highlights

• At first, Sarah breaks down some of her past roles within various agencies - ranging from a focus on analytics to paid advertising.
• Sarah talks about some of her new skills she’s been able to build - email marketing, content planning and customer engagement.
• Jetpack Workflow services accounting firms, CPAs, bookkeepers that typically employ anywhere from 10-15 employees.
• For the most part, the company focuses on accountants who have “big four” experience but have decided to strike out on their own.
• According to Sarah, the number one thing about her target audience is that they want to make sure they do not miss deadlines - and that’s where Jetpack Workflow comes into the picture.
• When scaling a small operation, it’s important for her target audience to ensure work doesn’t fall through the cracks - especially during time periods where seasonal staff are introduced within the operation.
• From a demand generation perspective, the company has a range of paid advertising in place - including software review platforms.
• The ultimate goal for the target audience is to start a 14-day free trial and then a nurturing sequence kicks in.
• The company has a flagship “grow your firm” course that’s used to educate the customer base.
• The company has a relatively short sales cycle (7-14 days) for smaller firms and larger firms require more of an engagement with the sales team.
• Right now, outbound is something that the company is testing as a majority of the pipeline is established through inbound marketing efforts and paid channels.

Key Points:

• Sarah mentioned “So some of the things that I learned in the first few months here was...things that I thought worked well for one industry doesn't mean they're going to work well for another. Best practices that you thought you knew on the back of your hand might have to go out the window because you're talking to a completely differen

This episode is produced by New North. New North is a strategic B2B marketing agency specializing in working with tech companies. Going beyond conventional tactics, we craft a personalized marketing strategy, conduct research, lay a solid foundation, execute dynamic campaigns, and continuously refine our approach through analysis.

With New North, your small, scrappy marketing team transforms into a powerful growth engine, achieving your goals with less pressure and more precision.